How to Create Customer Personas for Your B2B Marketing

About This Episode:

Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist and CEO of Marketing Interactions, joins the Business of Story Podcast to discuss the importance of knowing your customers in a godlike way and the shift brands need to make to become relevant to their audiences.

In This Episode:

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It’s All About the Customer

Ardath Albee, author, persona creator, and digital story strategist, was running a tech start-up in 2000, during the first-ever iteration of marketing automation. Companies came to her frustrated that their websites, which were just a copy of their company brochure slapped up online, weren’t getting any traction. Ardath began helping brands revise their content to actually speak to their customers.

Sure enough, they started to see change happen.

From there, Ardath worked with non-tech companies who were dealing with the same problems. In 2007, she started her own business creating a career out of her passion: helping B2B companies tell better stories around their complex sales, build great personas, and develop content marketing strategies that actually turn prospects into buyers and convince customers to stay.

Ardath joins us on the Business of Story to share the amazing wisdom she has gleaned from her 30+ years of marketing insight. We dive into her latest book, “Digital Relevance,” and bring you actionable tips to start truly knowing your customers, as Robert McKee says, in a godlike way.

In This Episode

Why your personas are critical to the complex B2B sell

How the “pronoun shift” will have a profound impact on the relevance of your content

What the Greek legend of Narcissus has to do with your brand

Why it’s important to turn one-off campaigns into serial business stories for true customer engagements

Tips to start creating your own buyer and customer personas

Ardath’s Relevance Maturity Matrix and how to make the shift to being relevant in the marketplace

Quotes From This Episode

“It’s really all about the customer. It’s not about the product. They could buy somebody else’s product and probably do the same thing.” —@ardath421

“We’re failing to differentiate ourselves as B2B companies because we’re focused on either trying to tell a better story than the competition or trying to prove that our product is the best, and nowhere in either of those two scenarios is the customer.” —@ardath421

“If you look at the context of the website, it is totally branded. Nobody’s confused about where they are or who’s talking to them, so why would you need to insert yourself into the content?” —@ardath421

“88 per cent of B2B marketers are doing content marketing, but most of them don’t know what it really should look like to be effective. If we don’t change the way we evaluate performance and the way we train our marketing teams, how can we expect them to be effective with a new skill set as we move forward?” —@ardath421

“The Greeks told us way back when, ‘Stop the selfie. Get rid of the selfie stick.’” —@ParkHowell (highlight to tweet)

“If you could just do one thing at a time to improve the way you come to market and the way you tell stories to your prospects, it’ll all start rolling together and get that snowball effect.” —@ardath421

“What people don’t understand is that a persona is about commonalities across a segment of your buyers. (highlight to tweet) So what you’re looking for is not the unique details that stand out, like, ‘Charlie drives a Corvette,’ or whatever. Who cares? If everybody else drives a station wagon and you write stuff about a Corvette, you’re only going to engage Charlie. You’re looking at these commonalities that cover a wider swath so that you can be as relevant as possible to the largest number of people.” —@ardath421

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Welcome to the Business of Story podcast, where the world's best storytellers from business, Hollywood, and beyond teach you how to use stories to communicate and connect with your customers. While technology has given us all global reach with our messages, it's still the ancient bewitchery of storytelling that connects us with one another. You will learn from some of the brightest content creators, advertising creatives, authors, professors, makers, marketers and brand raconteurs in the business. Within every show you will learn at least one actionable tip that will make your stories more engaging, and help you advance your personal or professional quest further, faster.